Afghanistan’s Terrible Secret

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Why does Afghanistan have a well-deserved reputation as the “graveyard of empires”? Alexander the Great, the Brits, the Soviets and now our own forces—all these foreign armies came and saw and conquered, just like Caesar. But they didn’t stay long.

Why is that? Was it the skill and tenacity of native Afghan fighters? Could they really match the Vietnamese, who not only kicked out the world’s greatest superpower, but actually defeated it, albeit at the cost of appalling losses of life, limb and property?

No, the secret of Afghanistan’s “success” is far more basic. It’s not a place that outsiders really want to stay and live. It’s high, arid, mountainous terrain is not suitable for farming or for bringing crops to market (except for opium poppies, which are valuable only because their product is highly sought but illegal). It has no oil or other valuable minerals, and those it may have are hard to find, extract and transport, let alone in a society perpetually mired in inter-ethnic turmoil. For a while, pols trying to justify our forever occupation touted Afghanistan as a source of rare earth metals, but you don’t hear that much anymore.

The truth is that Afghanistan is one of the poorest countries on Earth. Even today’s much-troubled Haiti has better soil and climate for farming, a winter that you don’t need stone homes burning rare trees or fossil fuels to survive through, and a topography far more suitable to transporting stuff by land or sea. “Hardscrabble” is a euphemism for Afghanistan, a kind word of encouragement.

So it wasn’t so much that indomitable Afghan fighters kicked the world’s conquerors out. It’s more that the conquerors all lost interest and went home.

That, of course, is precisely what we are now doing. Of all the many things I’ve read about Afghanistan in our twenty years of waging war there, a recent half-page op-ed piece best paints this sordid truth. Penned by one Farah Stockman, it describes in detail how our forces, contractors, camp followers and diplomats have distorted Afghanistan’s culture and tiny economy beyond all recognition. The report focuses sensitively on the abject plights of females and single men hoping to marry them. But it also tells the tale of an entire national economy bloated, twisted, corrupted and defiled by sustained contact with our incomparably larger one.

Two simple figures outline the story. Many Afghans who had a smattering of English volunteered to serve us as our translators because they could earn salaries of $1,000 per month or more—an impossible bonanza for ordinary Afghans. Yet since 2009, the Taliban have been able to entice fighters from the Afghan National Army by paying them salaries just a bit more than $70 per month. [Search linked source for “exploited.”]

How can the Taliban still afford to do that, after forty years of almost relentless war? Well, they own the countryside, where the food is grown. After we Yanks leave with our planes, Humvees, helicopter maintenance crews, financiers, consultants and Internet specialists, that’s what will provide the most basic source of wealth in Afghanistan: food. What we are witnessing as the artificial economy we have created and sustained for a generation implodes is a return to basics.

Without the generalizing that I have done here, that’s the precise picture that Stockman’s piece presents. We have inflated Afghanistan’s economy like a balloon, to an impossibly unnatural extent. As we leave, it’s already starting to collapse. Our pols and our people will never provide the whole nation with the standard of living that our conquerors and their enablers demanded while there, and that Afghans have never been able to provide for themselves on their own.

When you think about it, the prominence of food in the Afghan economy even explains some parts of its culture that we don’t like. In a country where food is hard to come by, and where women’s traditional role is confined to having and raising babies, things otherwise sick and strange to us start to make sense. It makes sense to cover women up, so that their sexual attraction doesn’t lead to more mouths to feed. It even makes more sense to treat women as commodities, to be sold into marriage for dowries, because it’s better for a richer man, who can feed the resulting extra mouths, to have them. That fact that all this leaves many young men without mates is mere social collateral damage. (Similar reasons motivated the Chinese custom of female infanticide while law regulated the number of children per family. One culture’s evil is another’s pragmatism or necessity.)

We in the “developed” world live in an incredibly complex and intricate society and culture, incomparably richer and more varied than Afghanistan’s. We have tens of thousands of foodstuffs in our supermarkets, and tens of thousands more items of hardware in our Lowe’s and Home Depot stores. So we tend to forget that ample (not just adequate) food is the fount of human civilization. Human civilization did not begin until agriculture and animal husbandry grew advanced enough to allow only a portion of our human population to feed the whole, leaving the rest to pursue other things.

Afghanistan is one of the few nations on Earth that teeters close to that pre-civilization precipice today. It has for most of its history. That’s why no conqueror has stayed there for long. And that is Afghanistan’s terrible secret.

But that secret is not unique to Afghanistan. Its truth will remain with our species always, however much we may claim to have mastered our earthly environment, and however far from reality and sense our hubris takes us. For famine and the primacy of food—at least at some times and some places—are never far away or beyond the risk of chance.

Climate change threatens to make other parts of the world much more like Afghanistan. Already we have serious scholars reporting that drought in the Middle East and the Horn of Africa has helped motivate migration, civil wars, and turmoil in places like Syria, Yemen, Eritrea and Somalia. When the land no longer supports the people who live on it, they seek other places and others’ lands. Mass migration and war, including civil war, often follows.

These disasters in other parts of the world are canaries in the coal mine for us and the rest of the so-called “developed” world. What happens when drought decimates the farms of California’s Central Valley, America’s predominant breadbasket for fruits, vegetables and nuts? What happens when freak hailstorms, cold snaps and heat waves cut crop yields nationwide? What happens when similar events occurring worldwide cut the reliability of the “global food supply chain” and set nation against nation?

There are already far too many of us humans on our small and ecologically fragile planet. As climate change presses our collective food supply, we will all begin to discover how much more a loaf of bread is worth than an iPhone or a popular digital song. Then we will begin to learn Afghanistan’s terrible secret for ourselves.

If we don’t start thinking seriously now about how to avoid that calamity, when it comes to us unbidden at home, anything we do will probably be too late. Afghanistan’s terrible secret will come to afflict us all.

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